Pink Smog Read online

  “Oh, and by the way, you might think I did the CPR on your mom that time, but you actually remembered more than you thought you did.”

  He smiled at me, a shimmer of light, and then he was gone.

  Maybe he was real. Maybe I’d made him up. Either way, he didn’t think I needed him anymore. Maybe he was right.

  On New Year’s Eve Bobby and Lily and I climbed onto the roof of my building and made a nest out of flannel sleeping bags. We lay with our heads on each other’s stomachs and watched the fireworks explode above our heads—burning chrysanthemums and fire fountains and heart-popping cherry bombs and shooting stars. Lily had stolen a bottle from her parents and we drank the cold, bitter white wine from plastic cups and chewed Bubble Yum to take the edge off.

  “My mom would shit,” Lily said, giggling. “That’s the best Chardonnay we’ve got.”

  “Chardonnay? Wow, fancy name. She should try it with a bubble-gum chaser,” Bobby said, blowing his.

  “Might cheer her up,” I added, out-blowing him.

  Even Lily took a sip and then stuck a piece of sugar-free gum in her mouth, working her jaw delicately, as if it hurt her.

  The sky kept filling up with shiny things and I could feel Bobby’s taut stomach rising and falling under me, and Lily’s light head with the wisps of hair resting on my belly.

  “Let’s do this every year for the rest of our lives,” I said, sitting up.

  “Yeah,” said Bobby, “to that.” He sat up, too, and held up his glass. So did Lily but I noticed that she hesitated for an extra second and she didn’t speak.

  “To that.”

  “And to L.A.,” I said. “Where it’s always warm enough to lie on a roof.”

  We raised our cups and the wine shone like gold in the chemical light, as if we had caught one of the falling firework stars in our plastic cups.

  “And to winter,” I said. “Which it never is.”

  There was a deep silence between us as if they were both holding their breath and I knew they were wondering if I was okay, if I was sad that Winter was gone. My head was feeling light and hot from the wine. In that moment I was all right. I had my friends. I liked to think that the pink polo shirt Bobby wore that night for the first time had nothing to do with the one I’d seen on the boy on Santa Monica Boulevard. I had seen Lily’s teeth tenderly nursing one marshmallow from the bag we had brought up with us and I told myself she might be getting better.

  “Hey,” she said. “Guess what?”

  We both looked over at her. I felt something clench inside my chest.

  “My parents are moving.”

  “What?” Bobby and I said it together. I had the ridiculous impulse to give her more marshmallows to eat—a few calories she needed, and if she were eating she wouldn’t be able to say anything more.

  “I have to go into this children’s hospital in Colorado so my parents are moving there,” she said calmly but her hands nervously stroked the little layer of fur that had grown protectively over her arms.

  Bobby flung his arm around her tiny shoulders. “Are you shitting me, Chin? I’m not going back to that junior hellhole if you don’t.”

  “You guys have each other,” she said, trying to smile. Her braces caught the light and twinkled merrily. It made me even sadder to see that brightness. I thought, Someone else is leaving. Again.

  But at least maybe Lily would gain weight. I had stopped really seeing how bad it was. I looked at her then. Her bones stuck out like weapons and her eyes were sinking into her head. Her hair fell out when she combed it—I’d seen her sparsely covered scalp where she made her part and her brush full of broken strands.

  I cuddled up next to her on the other side. We sat like that for a long time as the fireworks ended and the moon appeared again, watching us warily like a friend who was about to go away.

  That New Year’s Day I woke up with my heart pounding. I put on clothes and ran downstairs to the trash bin. I don’t even know why I did it. I opened the bin and looked inside.

  There was a cardboard box shoved into one corner under some plastic trash bags. Sticking out of the top was a Malibu Ken and a Francie doll with her hair in a ponytail. They were bound and gagged. I took them out, oblivious to the rotting banana peels, chicken carcasses, and moldy bread. I carefully removed the bandages from their mouths and the string from their hands and feet. I took them upstairs and bathed them and put them in my room but it was too late.

  After vacation I went back to school expecting to cling to Bobby like a baby blanket or stuffed animal but I wasn’t that surprised to find he was gone. I thought he might be sick so I called him, but no one answered. I went by his apartment and his sister opened the door.

  I realized I didn’t even know what her voice sounded like. She never spoke to us when she was around. Her blonde hair had grown out of the shag and was up in two pigtails and she had an unfocused look in her eyes. Her tiny legs were squeezed into a pair of torn, faded jeans and her feet were bare. The room smelled of pot.

  A boy was lounging on the couch behind her watching TV.

  “Hey,” I said. “Is Bobby around?”

  “We don’t know where he is,” she said. “We think he went to find his dad.”

  I thought of the Malibu Ken and the Francie doll waiting in my room. If there had been a doll to represent me, Anna had taken it away with her.

  I HEART L.A.

  Not much happened the rest of the semester. I vowed just to get through until the summer so I focused on my schoolwork and taking care of my mom and Monroe, who I walked with as many of the neighbor’s dogs as I could round up. I also spent a lot of time working on new outfits and I even made some for other people. I sewed a black cotton shirt for Mr. Gibbous, using an old shirt of my dad’s for the pattern—they were about the same size—and I put special lining under the armpits to absorb any extra perspiration. When I gave it to him he coughed and blushed and tried to suppress a smile. Miss Spinner got a T-shirt with a rhinestone heart on it and Mr. Adolf got one with a peace sign—not that I expected either of them to wear theirs but at least Miss Spinner thanked me really graciously. Mr. Adolf said, “Well, well, well,” and cleared his throat—I guess he thought I was messing with him. I designed a new pantsuit for Mrs. Musso, made out of some linen fabric I found at a thrift store and she did wear that. Even Staci got something—a denim shirt that I appliquéd with butterflies and flowers. I put it in her gym locker when she wasn’t looking and without a note saying who it was from but she never wore it as far as I knew.

  Staci avoided me all semester, except to give me vicious looks when she passed me in the hall. On the last day of school she came up to me where I was sitting alone, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with one of my dad’s ties and his vest that I had covered with rhinestones. My yearbook was on my lap. No one had signed it at all. I smiled at Staci—maybe she was going to ask me to sign hers and then I could have her sign mine. Maybe she was going to thank me for the shirt and we could make some kind of peace.

  “What’s it like not to have any friends, Louise?” she said, knowing, without even looking, that the book was empty of scrawled messages telling me to stay as sweet as I was and have a good summer vacation.

  “It kind of sucks,” I said. “You should know.”

  “I don’t think so. I have hundreds of signatures in here.”

  “Well, I’d rather not have any than have them because people are afraid of me,” I said.

  Staci stood there looking me up and down, her yearbook full of signatures balanced on her neat little hip. She was wearing a blue-and-white-striped tube top and jeans. “You’re not, though?” she asked.

  “Afraid of you? No. I have other things to be afraid of. Like the disease that might be killing Lily Chin or how dangerous it is for Bobby on the streets or if I’ll ever see Winter again or if I made him up. I worry about my mom’s drinking problem and if my father is okay. But mostly, now, I try not to be afraid of anything. Life is too cool, you know? Oh and by t
he way, I’ve been practicing. Do you know how big a bubble I can blow?”

  She wrinkled her nose and curled her upper lip irately.

  “Enough to blow you away, that’s how big.”

  I took a pink pillow-shaped piece of bubble gum out of my pocket, stuck it in my mouth, chewed it, and blew without taking my eyes off of her. Staci spat her old gum onto the ground, took a new piece out of her jeans, unwrapped it aggressively, popped it in her mouth, chewed, and blew—a bigger bubble. I blew back, an even bigger one. She tried again, but her bubble was small and flaccid.

  I was still waiting for my last bubble to pop—instead it sailed out of my mouth, toward Staci’s face. She backed away in horror but then my bubble floated gently up into the smoggy blue sky like a pink balloon. Staci’s eyes flashed a fury that obviously went way beyond the art of bubble blowing. Then she turned and walked away, her plastic comb sticking out of the back pocket of her skintight jeans like a weapon that could no longer harm me.

  Weeks passed. A slow, friendless, fatherless summer spent alone at the pool. I had pretty much given up on a lot of things, including discovering the meaning of the note I’d received before Halloween, but when I got home one night, there was a message from my dad on the machine.

  “Our movie’s on at midnight, your time, if you want to see it. Don’t think you’ve ever seen this one.”

  I was surprised because he didn’t usually leave messages. He and my mom still seemed to be ignoring each other. But this time he had left something that she might hear. And he had even called the movie “ours,” meaning his and hers, I thought, since she was the star. The Beast in the Garden, produced by Irv Feingold, had bombed pretty badly so they didn’t talk about it. For that reason, and because I was afraid his voice might upset her, I didn’t play her the message.

  But I did stay up until after she fell asleep and then I snuck into the living room in my pajamas, holding Mink and Petal Bug. I sat on the floor in front of the TV screen and let the images buzz and flicker their way into my brain. He was right—I hadn’t seen this one.

  My mom, looking very young, blonde, and voluptuous in a pink dress, played a girl named Isabella whose rich father goes on a business trip and stumbles upon the castle of a mysterious stranger. The stranger, hidden in shadows, tells the father he has to bring his daughter back to work for him as punishment for trespassing. The father refuses but the girl, fearing for his life, insists on going and runs away to the castle where she becomes friends with the man who will never show his face. Finally, she discovers that his name is Count Muerte, that he was badly burned in a fire and considers himself a monster. She falls in love with him anyway but in the end he dies and a handsome youth comes to the castle to carry her away on his white horse.

  It was pretty obvious what this was based on, especially when the count refers to it just before he dies at the end.

  Welcome Beauty, banish fear

  You are queen and mistress here

  Speak your wishes, speak your will

  Swift obedience meets them still.

  With that, I understood a lot of things but I still didn’t know where the note wanted me to go.

  Where I did go was into my room and got it out of the music box, read the ransom-style letters. Then I went and found the box full of my dad’s old notebooks and looked through them until I came to an interview someone had done with him about The Beast in the Garden. The paper was yellowing and torn and the print faded but still readable.

  In the interview, my dad said that my mom’s character was based on “a famous actress whose name we won’t mention here. Because she’s the ultimate tortured beauty.”

  “Count Muerte?” the interviewer wrote. “Fairly obvious, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Death is always obvious,” replied my father, “but that doesn’t mean we ever get used to it, do we?”

  The ultimate Beauty and the ultimate Beast, the ultimate Fear.

  My movie queen and mistress here

  I knew where to go. The next morning. On my birthday.

  It was hidden away. You wouldn’t even know it was there. You certainly wouldn’t know, driving by, that a goddess’s remains were there. My goddess.

  I took the bus down Wilshire into Westwood, got out at Glendon, and wandered around for a while, trying to find the entrance to the park. Finally, a grumpy ticket-taker at the nearby theater pointed me across a plaza and down an alley that led to the gate of an old churchyard hidden among the high buildings. There was a drive that circled a plot of green planted with large trees. They spread their branches low as if they were trying to comfort you. I walked along the path to my left. Coming toward me were two people I recognized: Tom “Sunshine” Abernathy and Uncle Oz from the condos. They were walking arm in arm. Tom was wearing the blonde wig he had let me try on once, or one of them, and a long pink dress. He waved at me and Oz nodded and they kept strolling along, toward the entrance. I didn’t have much time to ask them what they were doing there and I didn’t really have to—it was the one day of the year when everyone came to pay their respects.

  A small crowd of people were gathered at the crypt that was tucked unassumingly into a low wall in the shade. There were flowers everywhere—giant heart-shaped rose wreathes, little posies and nosegays and bouquets of all shapes and sizes. The stone was a light reddish color, from all the lipstick kisses of all the mourners for the last thirteen years. Kiss your wishes. I felt tears surge up in my chest and I had to keep myself from getting down on my knees and weeping. If you thought about her at all, no matter who you were, if you had any heart at all, it would make you cry. She was everything beautiful and sad in the world. She’d lost babies and husbands and she drank and took pills and she had light pouring out from under her skin like her spirit was too bright for one person’s body, even a curvaceously giving body like that. I would never be like her and I didn’t even really want to be. I just wanted to let her know that everything I would do or be for the rest of my life was a way to honor her in some way, to let her know that things didn’t have to end like that. I hoped they didn’t. I wanted to prove her wrong. I loved her.

  Charlie tells little Weetzie they are going somewhere special, somewhere magical. She is very excited—she dresses up in her best purple flowered dress and looks at herself in the mirror. Pretty!

  Charlie drives her in the Thunderbird. This is before she knows the layout of the city, before she thinks of it as her city. It is just a big place that her parents understand but she doesn’t. There are nice things about it—places with twinkling lights and tinkling music, but she doesn’t know how to get to any of them.

  At first this place just looks like a gate and then it looks like a park without swing sets or anything fun and then she sees the plaques in the ground and realizes what it really is. And she starts to cry.

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  It is worse than the mama elephant sinking into tar.

  He picks her up, apologizing, but he won’t leave. He wants to show her something.

  “See,” he says. “This is her grave. People from all over the world come to worship her. See the roses? See the kisses?”

  Weetzie wants more than a cold stone with roses and kisses. She wants Marilyn Monroe to be alive, like she is alive, like her mom, like her dad. She tells him that.

  “She’s more alive than I am,” says her father.

  “Marilyn,” I said, kissing the marble even though my lip gloss was too light to make much of a mark, more of a gloppy pale-pink smudge.

  Among all the little notes tucked along the edges, there was an envelope taped to the stone and I recognized it right away. It was silver and had my name written on it. Inside there was glitter but no note. Just a plane ticket to New York City.

  “You’re never coming back, Louise!” my mom said, clinking the ice in her glass. I had told her I wanted to visit my dad in New York.

  “Mom, my name is not Louise.” I spoke softly, the way you would to a child.
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br />   She swiped at a tear from her eye like a cat catching a spider. “I’m a terrible mother.”

  “No you’re not. Stop that. Just call me by my name.”

  “You’re never coming back.”

  “I promise I will,” I told her. “It’s just for a few weeks. I’ll call you every day.”

  Just then Monroe, as if on cue, jumped up onto her lap and began licking her face. My mom pretended to be annoyed, “Get that dog off,” but her posture softened and she held Monroe’s body gently in both hands, close to her bosom, almost like you would hold a baby.

  “She’s excited to be spending special time with Grandma, right, Monroe? Right, little starlet?”

  “Don’t leave us alone too long, my Weetzie,” my mother said, and I knew that was her way of giving me her blessing.

  She never called me Louise again after that.

  He met me at LaGuardia in a short-sleeved white shirt and black trousers. His back was wet with sweat when he hugged me.

  “So you found the ticket?”

  “The notes were all from you?”

  “Merrily the feast I’ll make/Today I’ll brew, tomorrow bake/Merrily I’ll dance and sing for next day will a stranger bring/Little does my lady dream/Charlie Bat is my name.”

  “What the heck?”

  “From ‘Rumpelstiltskin.’”

  “You are crazy, you know that? No wonder I’m so crazy. How’d you get them to me?”

  He smiled and pulled me close to him. He smelled bitter, like cigarettes and coffee, but the smell was warm and comforted me because it brought back all of his embraces, since the day I was born. “I had a little help? There are guardian angels everywhere. Even a few living in the Starlight.”